High tech and marketing

There is a lot of buzz about publishing “great content” these days however it becomes painfully obvious that great content is not going to cut it, not for the most of us anyway. Did you know how much data is published every single day? 2.5 quintillion bytes! If you don’t know what quintillion is don’t feel bad, you are not alone. The number is so large, most of us simply never heard of. To make things worse, there is difference between American English and British English what number quintillion actually represents.

According to American usage, quintillion is a number represented by 1 followed by 18 zeros, but according to British usage however, quintillion is a number that consists of 1 followed by whopping 30 zeros!

In any case, whatever quintillion means the number is so large most of us probably won’t be able to grasp it anyway. Nevertheless one thing is obvious though – so-called “great content” can easily get lost in all this quintillion noise!

So what you as a marketer should do? The answer is hopefully obvious – differentiate yourself. The question is how? Even giants like the Coca-Cola company and Kodak constantly seek to differentiate themselves by partnering with celebrities like Drake to compete for attention of their desired audience. This is primary reason why being a celebrity is not really about art anymore, except one type of art – the ability to influence masses and set trends. Drake net worth is over ten million dollars right now despite his young age, thanks to his deals with Kodak and Coca-Cola’s Sprite.

Being a celebrity is definitely profitable these days. NetWorthCity.com compiled an interesting list of richest rappers in the world with actual numbers that will blow your mind. When they go into more detailed breakdown of each rapper’s earnings it becomes clear that the primary source of income is endorsements and branded merchandise sales.

If you have a budget to hire a celebrity to endorse your product you must make a thorough research on type of audience each particular celebrity is able to reach. If you are aiming for middle age women with higher income, your best bet is to make a deal with someone like Celine Dion or Oprah rather than Drake or Dr Dre.

Unlike other forms of advertising collaborating with celebrities is probably the most powerful method to get buyers attention and, while expensive, if you apply all due diligence the results will pay off.

Now what about those who absolutely don’t have resources to get celebrity endorsement deals for their products? Well, there are solutions for you as well. Although not as effective, you are not absolutely paralyzed as you may think. But we will save that for the next time. More info on celebrity branding here.

Facebook has been widely criticized for their latest experiment and rightfully so. At the core of their experiment was manipulating users’ news feed to display either positive or negative posts from their contacts. About 700,000 unsuspecting Facebook users were served altered feed to manipulate their emotions in 2012, which triggered a complaint filed by privacy activists insisting that this type of practice violates users privacy agreement and messes with people’s minds and, obviously, emotions.

Normally scientists would need to obtain users permission for this type of experiment but back in 2012 anyone using Facebook had to sign privacy agreement that stated that their data could be used to improve Facebook products, which was later modified to agreeing to use this data for research.

Wondering about results of this controversial experiment? Well, the conclusion was that people who were served more positive messages were more likely to write positive posts, which sounds pretty much like common sense but scientists wanted a proof and now they have it.

It’s not a first time that Facebook runs experiments on their unsuspecting users. Years ago thousands of Facebook users received a message that they were logged out because they appear to be using fake names. To be able to continue using social network users had to prove they were real people using real names. This may sound like a usual thing these days, except that Facebook actually knew these people were real people using real names. The purpose of that experiment was to test their new security system, which of course falls nicely under TOS agreement.

While their login experiment was probably only minor annoyance for users, their 2012 experiment on emotions raises more questions. With 1.3 billion users one may expect all kinds of people using this social network, including severely depressed people and suicidal individuals. It doesn’t take a PhD in behavioral sciences to figure that serving negative feed while avoiding most or all positive messages to such people is not the best idea.